Pair of Bottle Coolers (Seaux à rafraîchir) (c. 1730): Art, History and Details

Pair of Bottle Coolers (Seaux à rafraîchir) (c. 1730) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Saint Cloud Porcelain Factory (French).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Saint-Cloud Porcelain Factory was known for its innovation in color. Shades of green and blue are used to paint the main decoration of these bottle coolers, a palette typical of the Chinese porcelain famille verte. The alternating red and gold outlines of the figures and objects is relatively rare and generally only seen on two shapes produced at Saint-Cloud, bottle coolers and cream pots.

Object facts

• Title: Pair of Bottle Coolers (Seaux à rafraîchir)
• Date: c. 1730
• Creator attribution: Saint Cloud Porcelain Factory (French)
• Culture: France, Saint Cloud, 18th century
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: soft-paste porcelain with enamel and gilt decoration
• Dimensions: Diameter: 11 x 11.5 cm (4 5/16 x 4 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1944.226

A detail from the museum

These bottle coolers would have been used to cool glasses or small bottles.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Morgan, J. Pierpont, and Xavier Roger Marie Chavagnac. Catalogue des porcelaines françaises de m. J. Pierpont Morgan. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1910.
• Foote, Helen S. "Early French and German Porcelain Formerly in the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 31 (November 1944).
• Savage, George. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century French Porcelain. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.